ACTION!

I’d never been on a film set before. To be honest, it wasn’t as glamorous as I thought it would be, even if it was just the Outsiders filming Revenge of the Teenage Zombie Bunyip from Mars.

We were standing around on a patch of scrubby ground next to a sugarcane field a couple of miles west of Shark’s Bay. The equipment they were using wasn’t exactly high-tech. The Outsiders were shooting on anything they could get their hands on—camcorders, smartphones, even an ancient Super 8 camera that used actual film. But they still seemed to know what they were doing.

“We do most of the sound later,” Nico explained. “There’s usually too much background interference if we record it live.”

They were filming a chase scene through the cane field and were having some trouble deciding how to do it. I suggested that we could sketch out a few ideas beforehand just to figure things out, and it seemed to work.

“Hey! You can be our storyboard artist,” Ellie said.

Until then I didn’t know there was such a thing as a storyboard artist. I’d never thought about my drawings being useful before.

I sat underneath the shady part of a tree and started sketching. Maybe these drawings could be in the exhibit at the surf club, I thought. I did need something to deflect attention from my evil plan, after all.

I still had to convince the Outsiders to help. They were no fans of Bradley and Belinda and the rest of the Surf Gorillas, but what I was planning needed some real motivation. The Outsiders hadn’t been publicly humiliated like me.

As I sketched, I wondered if they would risk everything just to help me get revenge.